Credibility: A multidisciplinary framework

Abstract

IntroductionThis chapter reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the concept of credibility and its areas of application relevant to information science and technology, encompassing several disciplinary approaches. An information seeker's environment-the Internet, television, newspapers, schools, libraries, bookstores, and social networks-abounds with information resources that need to be evaluated for both their usefulness and their likely level of accuracy. As people gain access to a wider variety of information resources, they face greater uncertainty regarding who and what can be believed and, indeed, who or what is responsible for the information they encounter. Moreover, they have to develop new skills and strategies for determining how to assess the credibility of an information source. Historically, the credibility of information has been maintained largely by professional knowledge workers such as editors, reviewers, publishers, news reporters, and librarians. Today, quality control mechanisms are evolving in such a way that a vast amount of information accessed through a wide variety of systems and resources is out of date, incomplete, poorly organized, or simply inaccurate (Janes & Rosenfeld, 1996).Credibility has been examined across a number of fields ranging from communication, information science, psychology, marketing, and the management sciences to interdisciplinary efforts in human-computer interaction (HCI). Each field has examined the construct and its practical significance using fundamentally different approaches, goals, and presuppositions, all of which results in conflicting views of credibility and its effects. The notion of credibility has been discussed at least since Aristotle's examination of ethos and his observations of speakers' relative abilities to persuade listeners. Disciplinary approaches to investigating credibility systematically developed only in the last century, beginning within the field of communication.

Expertise, credibility of system forecasts and integration methods in judgmental demand forecasting

“…Second, source credibility is one of the constituents of trust, and higher levels of trust in a system's advice have been found to reduce advice discounting (Goodwin, Gönül, & Önkal, 2013). Finally, if advisors feel that they are relatively less task-expert than the expert system, then we would expect less advice discounting (Rieh & Danielson, 2007).…”

Credibility and legitimacy in policy-driven innovation networks: resource dependencies and expectations in Dutch electric vehicle subsidies

“…Credibility is a broad concept with many dimensions that has been studied in many scientific fields and. It is especially important when communicating messages (Rieh and Danielson 2007), which is also the domain we are interested in. We are concerned with actor credibility as a source of legitimacy to reward project On actor level and on consortium level:…”

On credibility improvements for automotive navigation systems

“…Most research on credibility focuses on website credibility [7,18,22,23], only few work addresses credibility of ANS. Kantowitz et al [12] showed that unreliable traffic information degrades the credibility of navigation systems.…”

“…Navigation is, and must remain, a secondary task in the driving context. Thus, credibility guidelines from other domains, such as website credibility [6,7,22,23], cannot be directly applied to ANS. Following the discussion in the previous section, we aim to enhance credibility by 1.…”